Rabbi’s Campaign for Kosher Standards Expands to Include Call for Social Justice

A dozen years ago, Rabbi Morris Allen stood before his congregation
in this Twin Cities suburb to announce a program called Chew by Choice.
As Conservative Jews, the members of his synagogue were bound by
religious law to eat only kosher food, but as typical Americans,
relatively few did so. So the rabbi asked them just to stop eating
flagrantly impermissible foods like pork and shellfish as the first
step toward fuller observance of the dietary strictures.

The campaign at his synagogue, Beth Jacob Congregation, ultimately
won Rabbi Allen an invitation to lecture at an Orthodox yeshiva in New
York. Closer to home, he served alongside Orthodox rabbis on a
kosher-certification panel for the Twin Cities area and collaborated
with a local Hasidic rabbi in encouraging supermarkets to stock kosher
meat after the last kosher butcher in St. Paul went out of business.

In the last year, however, Rabbi Allen has extended his concern with
kosher standards from adherence to religious ritual to commitment to
social justice. His drive to create a “hechsher tzedek,” a justice
certification, on the basis of how kosher food companies treat their
workers, has brought him into intense conflict with the Orthodox
authorities who traditionally have dominated the certification process.

Last month, the hechsher tzedek received formal endorsement from the
Rabbinical Assembly, the national association of Conservative rabbis.
In voting to support Rabbi Allen’s initiative with an unspecified
amount of “volunteer and financial support,” the assembly invoked a
verse from Deuteronomy declaring, “You shall not abuse a needy and
destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger.”

The biblical reference fit with Rabbi Allen’s own line of argument.
With kosher meatpacking plants heavily dependent on Latino immigrant
labor, he has maintained, it is no longer sufficient for kosher
certification to be granted solely on the basis of proper Jewish
methods of inspecting and slaughtering animals.

“As concerned as we are about how an animal gets killed, we need to
be equally concerned about how a worker lives,” Rabbi Allen said in an
interview several weeks ago at his synagogue. “We need to be certain
that the food we are obligated to eat is produced in a way that
demonstrates concern with those who produce it.”

While the catalyst for Rabbi Allen’s action was a series of articles
in The Forward weekly newspaper about accusations that workers at a
large kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa are exploited, the resulting
conflict has far wider import. The kosher-food industry accounts for
annual sales of $11.5 billion, much of it to 1.1 million steady
consumers, according to the Lubicom marketing firm. Such major
corporations as ConAgra and Cargill have kosher subsidiaries.

By religious tradition, and in some cases state law as well, kosher
certification generally rests with Orthodox boards. Each council, or
“vaad,” will put its insignia on an approved product, allowing a
consumer to know which products are meat, which are dairy and which are
neutral. The Orthodox Union, the largest force in certification,
oversees more than half the kosher items in circulation.

So the entrance of the Conservative movement into the field
represents a challenge to the Orthodox authorities not only on ethical
grounds but also on market share.

Even before activity began on the hechsher tzedek, Conservative Jews
tended not to follow the Orthodox model in insisting that meat be not
just kosher but “glatt” as well. The term means “smooth” and refers to
the fact that a slaughtered animal’s lungs had no defect. In practice,
glatt meat has been perceived as somehow more kosher than kosher, and
it is invariably more expensive, too.

Still, the current friction might never have emerged had it not been
for a lengthy investigative report by Nathaniel Popper in The Forward
last May. Quoting union activists, a local Roman Catholic priest and
several workers who were cloaked by pseudonyms, Mr. Popper accused the
AgriProcessors packing plant in Postville, Iowa, of paying substandard
wages and offering minimal safety instruction and health care to its
800 employees, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala.

The owners of AgriProcessors disputed the portrayal, even taking out
a full-page ad in The Forward to rebut it. But Rabbi Allen, who had
been involved in getting Twin Cities stores to buy kosher meat from the
Iowa plant, took up the issue with leaders of both the Rabbinical
Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the
movement’s congregational arm. Last August, he went as part of a
five-member team to visit Postville, meeting with owners, senior
managers and about 60 current or former workers.

“We weren’t able to verify everything Popper wrote,” Rabbi Allen
recalled, “but what we did find was equally painful and filled with
indignities.”

His study group specifically criticized AgriProcessors, which has
been resisting efforts at unionization, in three areas. Its starting
wage of $6.25 an hour came to about $3 less than unionized kosher
slaughterhouses pay. It gave workers safety training in English, even
though many were fluent only in Spanish. And it provided only one
option for health-care coverage at a cost of $50 per week for a family.

By the time the United Synagogue threw its support behind the
hechsher tzedek last December, both the concept and Rabbi Allen had
come under widespread attack from Orthodox figures. Rabbi Asher
Zeilingold of St. Paul, who had collaborated with Rabbi Allen in the
past, emerged as a very public defender of AgriProcessors, issuing a
report that characterized The Forward’s accusations as “completely
unfounded, without any basis in fact.”

In an arrangement that is relatively common in kosher certification,
Rabbi Zeilingold is paid by AgriProcessors to oversee the plant.

The trade magazine Kosher Today quoted Rabbi Zeilingold decrying
Rabbi Allen’s “deceptive behavior.” A certification council tied to the
Satmar Hasidic sect denounced the hechsher tzedek. A prominent rabbi
writing an opinion column in The Jewish Press, a weekly newspaper with
a largely Orthodox readership, described the social justice
certification as an “alien imposition.”

Rabbi Menachem Genack, the chief executive of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division, has taken a more carefully modulated stance.

“The issues raised — workers’ rights, safety, environmental issues
— are not mundane issues,” Rabbi Genack said last week in a telephone
interview. “The question is one of implementation. These issues are
best dealt with within the mandate of other agencies — federal and
state. We believe they’re handling it properly and have the expertise
and the authority to handle it.”

Such arguments have plainly not swayed the Conservative movement.
Now that the Rabbinical Assembly has endorsed the hechsher tzedek in
principle, Rabbi Allen said, the next step is to formulate the specific
standards each workplace would be required to meet. His goal is to have
that list drafted by Rosh Hashanah in early September, the holiday that
begins Judaism’s period of reflection and atonement.